Inspiration, ideas and information to help women build public speaking content, confidence and credibility. Denise Graveline is a Washington, DC-based speaker coach who has coached nearly 200 TEDMED and TEDx speakers--including one of 2016's most popular TED talks. She also has prepared speakers for presentations, testimony, and keynotes. She offers 1:1 coaching and group workshops in public speaking, presentation and media interview skills to both men and women.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

When you say "yes" to an invitation to speak, you hope it embraces you in return, and that's exactly what happened on my trip to London last week to give the closing keynote at the International Speechwriting Conference. As one whose biggest motivators are intellectual challenges and creativity, this conference was a perfect fit for me. I have weeks of great blog posts to come, but wanted to share these notes from my trip, particularly as they relate to my topic of women and public speaking. I think it's better than a handout:

Before the conference, I had lunches with two TEDMED speakers with whom I worked this spring: Pritpal Tamber, MD, and artist Sue Austin, both based in the UK. It was lovely to get encouragement and advice from them, in a bit of reverse coaching.

My theme was "The Lady Vanishes," looking at the various ways, ancient and modern, in which we silence women speakers or render them invisible. I didn't think this was a problem myself until other speechwriters and coaches kept asking "Can you find more recent examples than Eleanor Roosevelt?" Why can't we name more examples of famous women speakers? was the mystery I posed to the group. The reasons range from forbidding women to speak outright and shaming them publicly to discourage speaking, to reducing them to their wardrobes. Primarily, though, we just keep selecting few or no women speakers for our conference programs. I shared hopeful signs that audiences (via Twitter) and conferences (via quotas) are publicizing the lack of women speakers. There's much speechwriters can do to help, including making sure their speeches get published so people like me can find and share them in places like The Eloquent Woman Index--and so more women can have female speakers as role models, as new research shows that seeing strong women speakers has a positive impact on young women's public speaking skills. UPDATE: I've put the notes for my keynote on the blog here.

"Women bring different ideas to a program," were the wise words of conference organizer Brian Jenner. Women speakers were one-third of this meeting's roster. I was honored to share the mic with Martha Leyton ofCreativity Works; Annelies Breedveld-Smit, speechwriter for Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the Netherlands' first female minister of defense; andEdmee Tuyl, a ballerina-turned-speaker-coach from The Hague who coached us to use movement and gesture to express words, an inventive exercise. "A speech should be to the speaker as music is

Speechwriters dancing their words.

to the dance," she told us.

Disparate views: No smart speaker expects complete agreement in the audience. After I told him about this incident in which a female speaker was subjected to live comments on Twitter from men in the audience speculating what it would be like to "do her," Charles Crawford neatly demonstrated in his blog post on my talk some of the blame-the-victim backlash against strong women speakers, writing "You feminists helped create the 'anything goes' morality-free pornographied Western world we now have. Accept your share of responsibility for that." As Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again." Speaker coach Celia Delaney blogged about my talk and shared some of her own experiences with that same problem as a woman speaker and organizer, quite a different view.

Finally, there's another International Speechwriting Conference coming up in September in Brussels. Brian Jenner is a thoughtful conference organizer, and if this session was any indication, you'll find the September conference loaded with great content and smart people with whom to network. I'm thankful to have had this plum speaking slot at the spring conference, and am already plotting a return visit.